Author: I. Gallows

In this parade of charades you are but lighting and shadein a never ending guessing game.Who can we portray to you to make you believe what we say?Woven symbols of a narrativewe so meticulously orchestrate, What is a name? What is a face? Everything we say will never be erased.Press the spine and watch us break. A fictive biography of would be histories.Superficial symphonies sang in the key of Me. An opus higher than an opiate; push the needle in and watch it bleed. In a measure sung by a pack of liarscan one voice ever be louder than a choir?

All conjured illusions interlinked,A spider web of mirror deja vu.Woven so tightly,lest we all be crushed by the weight of truth. You’ve so many faces, I never know which one is you.

Have we ever truly met, my friend? In a world where reality shifts and bendsI fear we have lost sight of where the stage ends. Cover your ears,we can still pretend.

A brilliant star collapsed inside my gutand it’s a hole that since has never shut. It takes, it breaks, and it unmakes in a fever of bones and blood–and even though I know, I know, I cannot endure this storm alone.

As if pain were a tree you diligently water, for the shade of its branches has been all you’ve known of shelter.

A beautiful ride. A brightly lit amusement teetering along a set axis of imaginary lines.

Thoughts turn to memories and memories to translucent dreams as a familiar tune I know now all too well sings just for me. Under the alluring spell of nostalgia, soothed by the smooth porcelain hands of familiarity, I am anchored in the deceit I sell myself that this is what it means to be free.

The comforting weight of knowing that today will spin on forever, keeps me in place.

Tomorrow becomes a forgotten friend I told secrets to in the spring of my youth. Under canopies where we carved our names into towering titans whose changing foliage was our only sense of time. When we ran naked and wild in limitless fields of our imaginations and flew about with invisible wings.

And now, we dream digital dreams birthed from the wombs of screens. The Gods and their magics have all faded away, starved out in disbelief. Pregnant with the knowledge this age of wisdom brings, tomorrow seems a happily never after just beyond my reach. Like the limbs of impossible trees that taunted me in that childhood of virgin spring.

I am far from my jungles now, lost in the crowd of a parade called, “Someday”.

These painted horses and magical seats find me and carry me aloft. Destination: unknown, yet certainly familiar. For the everyday happens every day. Again and again and again. Seasons merge into seasons at an accelerating pace. Years skip along the rippling surface of time like weeks, never sinking; still finding me in the same place.

And when I lay my heavy head down again, that song becomes a lullaby and on whatever surface my body finds tonight, I will dream the same thing; of a life I don’t constantly feel the need to escape from,

And the dream remains a dream.

II

Then, dawn finds me again.

All fades and recedes like the black curtain of night, as I get back on the carousel stage.

Allured by it’s siren song and captivating lights, blinded to all else that would enter my sight, the ride will cough and sputter to life. The circular motion provides an illusion of progression. I am moving, if only further from the point of origin that was myself. The wind is in my hair and the lights dance about like fire flies in a Southern night. Artificial stars guiding me to a destination I’ll never find.

A rat in a wheel aware that it serves, in spite…

Be still, my rampant mind.

For it’s all…

just a ride.

III

And this,

this is goodbye.

For I am that which must collide to break the constant spinning of cycles.

Farewell, ye well oiled machines, whose machinations are beyond me. Whose design produces assembly line drones and counterpart white collar clones existing in living limbo on the fresh cut lawns of suburban purgatory. You, who sour the Earth with pollutions that poison the imaginations of minds and darken the native born, holy exuberance of men’s souls!

They sold a Nightmare donning the mask of a Dream with tickets bought by those lost in perpetual sleep. Our dreams orphaned on a busy street. I cradle my newly adopted son of insomnia.

Farewell to the painted horses whose instinctual trajectory brought me to memorable places I have since forgotten. The people I passed by passing through. Out of focus, brightly colored silhouettes who painted a picture a thousand others could paint rather than signing their masterpieces with scar or stain. Momentary loss for temporary gain. Spinning each other around, again and again.

The innumerable static distractions and few starving affections. The angel choir chorus of slapping skin and creaking mattress; spun round the willing impostors to an endless waltz and grand skeletal ballet. Spinning in pretty circles until the scenery recycles.

Allow me to forget the steps. The modern dance of romance that leaves me dizzy for the band is always off time and off key.

Enrapture me in silence and cloak me in a void,So that I may find my voice.Leave me deaf and leave me blind.So that among the muted progression of seven billion songs screaming towards heaven I can find myself in this passage of time.

I swore oncethat there was a magic in desire that could give flight to creatures born without wings.

I levitated on this feeling once.But butterflies are all but a forgotten memory.

Remind me.

Please.

For all I have are dreams of what has yet to be; for that is all I will let be.

Here, amidst the soil of this savage garden, I have come to fear the thorns of every flower from the times that I have bled, yet still–I am intoxicated by the scent.And this love would bloom if only I would fetch the water,

The wolf licked his muzzle, still slick with the blood of his prey. The crimson hue of viscera indiscernible against it’s black as midnight coat. He scratched behind his ears, his claws scraping against giant horns that protruded unnaturally like that of a devil. It savored the taste with what could almost be mistaken as a smirk and then, intoxicated with satisfaction, the great beast collapsed, his paws lazily hanging over the edge of a bluff that gazed at an endless horizon of giant trees and imposing mountains. The wolf watched with one eye lazily open as a plume of dust and flower blossoms burst forth from the long grass and took to the air. The pedals cascading gingerly in a waltz with the wind as they flew down the vast valley below him in a sea of red and gold, until finally vanishing into the brilliance of the setting sun.

The great beast lifted it’s head and sniffed, then stretched with a dramatic yawn before curling into himself. The chill of Autumn was fast approaching. It’s culling breath bringing the slow death of Winter that would claim the weak and the sick from his land to let life thrive anew. And this was http://themanateem.com/wp-json/ his land, the trees told him. Speaking in a language older than time that he could not comprehend, but one that he somehow understood. This forest belonged to him, and he belonged to the forest.

The Trees spoke to him, in creaks and groans and with wordless spells weaved from skeletal boughs that shivered from cold. A tuneless hymn that comforted his restless spirit with a constant hum. A sonnet that sung praises of his name and revered him as a God. A great protector. This was recommended you read his land, and he would partake in the hunt here until the forest that bore him life took him again in death. There was no past, there was no future. Only the hunt.

And yet, somewhere deep within him, between his swollen belly and pride, something gnawed at him. An itch he could not scratch, like a tick that had burrowed itself into the back of his mind. For as long as the wolf could remember, he had felt chased.

He was lightning made flesh. He brought with him a storm of claws and teeth. And still, he felt prey to something he could not sense. Stalked by a memory he could not recall that lay waiting for him. He had forgotten something, a task so much more greater than his station as the warden God of this land. No matter how long the trees sang for him, his body was restless and his dreams were haunted. When he dared to close his eyes again, he dreamed of her.

A woman with skin like snow and hair tangled in a fire that somehow did not burn him. He feared and worshiped her, but he knew nothing of her tongue to sing her praise. She called to him, and he could not understand. He touched her with hands that were not his, the hands of a man. He felt her on his bare skin that had no fur but was never cold. There was a ravenous hunger that seemed insatiable, he desired her body but his teeth never broke her skin. In his sleep, the wolf bared his fangs with a longing to feel her smooth neck snap like a twig in his jaws and taste her blood, but as a man he had no claws or teeth. Just a soft mouth that took hers into his…over and over and over–

The wolf woke in the night crying with fear and fury. In the wake of his dream lay a monstrous sadness and anger residing in his heart all at once; clashing like two storm fronts colliding in the heavens. He howled, and lightning burst forth from his mighty jaws that tore a bright rift into the once black sky. Creatures of the night flew away from him with shrill shrieks of panic. He could feel the familiar pulse of the earth below him seek to placate his torment, but nothing could soothe the sickness he felt in his heart. A heart that this beast somehow knew was not only his.

Something was trying to surface within him and he would suffocate this other thing that dared to speak until it ran out of breath and surfaced no more. Nothing would overcome him. He was the wind, and all bows to the gale; even the mountains in time. But something else just as immense and dreadful as he had been looming behind him for far too long. Days passed into nights that brought through it’s black curtain a nightmare theater. Each night becoming more vivid than the last, clawing at his eyes until they were lashed red. The thing that hunted him was drawing closer. He felt it with his bones, with every shudder of his sharp instincts. Until the tremors grew to a quake and told him to run. And so he ran.

How long he ran, he did not know. Days blended into night and he dared not dream again. Leaves fell until there were leaves no more and the forest shuddered under a blanket of snow. Naked, still, and lifeless. The wolf’s breath frosted and singed with raw energy from the storm that surged within him. His waking life was surrounded by ghosts he could not outrun. He had fled his dreams and now they had followed him here.

Faces he somehow knew but could not name chased him out of his forest and out of his mind. In his flight he begin to see specters. Phantoms from a past that brought pain that stabbed his heart like so many knives just from the sight of them. They hunted him, this great forest god, like a dog. And no matter how fast his flight, his past was always there ahead of him–waiting.

His great paws bled. His bones ached. His silver eyes bloodshot from the sleep he eluded. He had not known exhaustion, not truly, until his pace slowed to a trot, then to a crawl, until his great and terrible frame collapsed into the snow. It blanketed him slowly, the cold a welcome respite to the blood that had been boiling within him for so long. He saw the faces of his pursuers surrounding him now, these phantasms portraits of grief and pity. He snorted into the snow with what could almost pass as laughter.

You, pity me? The Beast thought in the midst of his fever. I never needed you.

As if they could hear his thoughts, the visions vanished and he felt the pain in his heart only amplify at their departure. Carrion birds circled above him patiently while winter crept into his heart and he bid it freeze. He would run no more. Soon there would be nothing. No more dreams. No more ghosts. No more listening to the laughter of crows. The torment that gnawed at him would cease to bite and he would commit himself to the earth. How easy this was, to finally surrender…

The wolf closed his eyes for what he prayed would be the last time.

The woman with fire in her hair came for him again, as he knew she would. He whimpered softly and his eyes pleaded to her. She bent down and he felt the burst of warmth from her hand part the snow from his eyes. Was this still a dream? Her eyes met his with kindness, understanding, and…an insufferable sadness. A sadness he somehow knew he had helped author.

“You have to wake up, Sol.” she spoke. The song of her voice was sweeter than the forest ever sounded.

The wolf groaned with a tongue that was not his,“I…I…”

She leaned in and whispered in his ear, “I will wait for you…”

Then she was gone. All was quiet and still. Time knew no measure until the wolf commanded his body to move and it slowly acquiesced to his demands. The snow falling off him as he desperately searched the woods for any trace of her. He began to move again, his body fueled only by sheer will now. The forest began to slowly recede, it’s hum now barely a whisper in his ears as the trees became sparser and sparser. Above him the pale sunlight began to creep in through the dense canopy and he began to see the clouds above him, pregnant with rain. He felt the wind shift directions against his fur and caught the scent of the sea not too far from him. The wind stung his nostrils with a salted bite and–something else. Something so familiar that the wolf froze and he remembered a name.

“I–Ireena?”, the wolf spoke. His vocal chords deep and strained, rusted with time.

The wolf shot out of the snow like lightning from a thunder cloud. His body screamed but his roar was louder. A light rain began to fall as he ran towards the scent, his body a freight of desperate desire careening towards the one thing that ever felt like home. The beast broke through great trees, snapping trunks in twain as if they were nothing. The very floor beneath him seemed to quake in panic when suddenly, the forest itself moved against him. The earth shifted and heaved in mighty tremors as gnarled tendrils shot from the ground and roots grasped at his limbs.

He roared and snapped as he smashed through rock and root as they splashed and splintered against his mighty form. His energy waned as he plummeted against the wilds. His body beaten with sleeplessness and hunger. He slowed. No matter how many boughs he broke against his body they continued their assault. He frothed at the mouth, snapping and gnawing until the tendrils of forest ensnared him in shackles. The feeling of chains all to familiar.

Instantly the wolf was transported to a cage in his mind. He was now a just a small child, crying and afraid behind bars that his tiny limbs could not yield to bend. A prisoner put on display for the world’s entertainment for his difference. He was a Tiefling, a spawn of demons and man, cursed for an existence and form he never chose. Years spent in chains tattooing permanent scars on his wrists and ankles that would never heal in his body or his soul. Until one day the boy summoned his wrath into a wreath of flame, like the devil they all claimed him to be. And with his own burning shackles choked the life out of his captors and escaped.

Lightning and flame surged in the wolf’s eyes and his great body heaved with renewed fury. He would never be a prisoner again, not even in paradise. He was the god of this forest, the forest was not his god. And he would command it to bow. His heaving breath smoked in the winter air and crackled. The wolf howled, his eyes glowed from silver to a blinding white ignited with cosmic sparks. The clouds above him darkened and burst open. With a power he had forgotten he had paid a great price for, he brought the wrath of the heavens down.

The wolf emerged from what was left of the wilds, the forest all but ash and smoke behind him. His body burned, bloodied, and broken. The rain pelted his fur and blood ran in streams from his wounds.

In the clearing before him, he saw a cabin by the sea, built upon a cliff. A house he had built, in another life. Like the north star at sea, a lone light illuminated a window and the hearth smoked. The beast moved toward the cabin with a will no longer it’s own, it resigned itself to the voice it had made mute for so long.

With each step he recalled a different memory, as if leaving the forest allowed him to finally remember. Flashes of another life surged across his mind. This was the home they made with each other, him and the woman with fire in her hair. Far away from anyone who would do them harm. They’d both been hunted in their other lives. And from then on, far and away from anything that they had known, they could finally find some semblance of peace in their house above the sea.

His broken spirit began to lift as he stepped closer and closer. He’d be haunted by her memory no more. Now, he could finally join her and the beast could rest. He moved quietly in the rain, fear suddenly gripping him but not enough to stay his pace. He followed the scent and then he found her. Beneath a pile of wet dirt and a weathered stone that read,

The wolf stared at the stone. Reading the words over and over as the rain spattered against it. Below him the waves crashed and he recalled a vision of her playing in the sea with no regard for anything but the waves. He longed to see her again. He began to whimper, and pawed at the wet dirt below him. This couldn’t be true. He had to see. He had to see her. His bloodied paws moved the earth and the mud with a desperate frenzy.

A door burst open behind him and a woman readied her rifle against the pillar of her porch and fired a warning shot into the air.

“STOP!”, she screamed as the gunshot echoed off the cliffs.

The wolf turned with a growl and bared his fangs. He saw a red haired woman behind him who looked so much like the woman in his dreams that his eyes widened and his jaw closed. But she was not his Ireena. Her hair was a dark red, and she had eyes the color of the sea at midday and her belly was swollen with child. While the wolf could smell her fear, he could still sense her resolve. Seeing those eyes behind the rifle’s sights, that gaze told him she would not flee.

He looked back at the tombstone and the world seemed to freeze. Nothing moved but the rain. The women kept her eyes down the sights, while the wolf contemplated the grave. Suddenly, he broke the armistice and tilted his head back. The woman jolted as his haunting cry echoed off the cliffs. His howl suspended in time and air. He continued to mourn, as other wolves from far and away in the forest took up his lament.

The woman kept her rifle aimed true at the giant wolf’s heart but paused. She studied it’s body, broken and battered from a recent battle, but also a lifelong one. His body reminded her of a tree that had been struck by lightning. Parts of it’s skin still singed from the burn, and arcs of electricity still seemed to pulse bright and blue from his veins. But it was the horns that curled back from his head…those horns.

Her eyes widened as the howl turned into an inhuman cry, distorted and unnatural. She saw the fur from the wolf began to fall from his form. It’s bones began to snap. Cracking in and out of place as she watched in horrid fascination the monstrous wolf turn into the form of sobbing man. A man with skin like that of a corpse and grey eyes that burned bright against his tattooed face. The horns of a devil sprouting ominously from long black hair that failed to cover a trail of a lightning scar down the right side of his cheek. His naked and scarred body shook, whether it was from the cold or his pain, she did not know.

But she did know him.

“Are you…Solitude?”, she asked from behind her rifle.

The Tiefling slowly stifled his sobs. He looked at the woman, with tears still flowing from his silver eyes lost amidst the falling rain. Without irises, his eyes seemed devoid of expression and yet still, they were the saddest eyes she had ever seen.

“I…am. I…was.”, he said looking away from her. The scarred half of his face seemed paralyzed and sagged, and he spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Are you…Ireena’s daughter?”

“Reena was my Grandmother. My name is Rose.”, she said, finally putting down her rifle against the cabin. “She was waiting for you, you know?”

Solitude recalled the last thing Ireena had ever said to him. It was right before he had left to forage the forest before the Winter snowed them in. She said the same thing she had whispered in his ear in the forest,

“I will wait for you.”

He startled suddenly as Rose placed a fur coat over him to shield his body from the cold of the rain. She knelt in front of him, and reached out to touch his horns before stopping herself.

“I thought you were a dream brought on by the fever that took her. But here you are. The man who was a devil that was a beast…She told me about you, right before she died. She told me everything. And I never believed her. She told me she waited for you. And when you didn’t come back from the forest she went looking for you. She said it felt like…like the wilds were keeping you from her. They say these woods are cursed. That this forest grants you wishes. She went in there over and over, wishing to see you again, going round in circles that always brought her back. Until one winter she fell ill and a hunter found her half dead in the snow. He took her back here and nursed her back and well, you know how it goes…Guess she finally got her wish though.”

She paused for a long while awaiting a response, but none came. “Why didn’t you come back?”

Solitude’s eyes rose from the grave to Rose’s eyes, searching and hoping for some manner of deception that was not there. How had it been so long?

“The forest did not let me leave and I…I forgot myself. It felt like a dream, or a curse I just kept drifting deeper into. A part of me always knew. Maybe I chose to forget…”

The Tiefling rose up with great effort, and with a slight raise of his hand the soil he’d dug up around the disturbed grave began to shift and coalesced into a proper burial mound once again. Rain pattered on the fresh soil as he outstretched his bleeding arm and let a few drops of blood drip over the soil. Tiny buds began to emerge from the earth that grew with unnatural speed into brilliant red roses that blossomed all around the grave of Ireena Holstead.

“I am so sorry,” said the Devil to the flowers. “Did she live a happy life?”

“She lived,” said Rose. “That’s more than most get.”

Solitude clutched the fur to his chest and turned to the direction of the sea and began to limp away.

“Wait,” cried Rose. “…why did you call yourself ‘Solitude’?”

The Tiefling stopped and turned to her, forcing a smile at her with the part of his face that could still move.

“Other than Ireena, it’s the only thing I ever wanted. I guess the Forest gave me my wish, too.”

Rose watched until he was out of sight and legend.

The Devil who helped stop a great curse that affected an entire people fell victim to one of his own making. No one knows what fate befell Solitude, but every Fall there after the Holstead family would find furs and food at their doorstep to get them through the harsh Winters. And as the cemetery on the cliff grew, each new grave would suddenly blossom with the the most brilliant red roses. Until the cliff the cabin was built on eventually fell into the sea. For all bows down to the gale in the end.